In Defense of Food An Eater's Manifesto
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IN DEFENSE of F O O D
A L S O BY M I C H A E L POLLAN
Second Nature
A Place of My Own
The Botany of Desire
The Omnivores Dilemma
IN DEFENSE
of F O O D
AN EATER'S M A N I F E S T O
MICHAEL POLLAN
THE P E N G U I N PRESS
NewYoik « 2008
THE P E N G U I N PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. - Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
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First published in 2008 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Michael Pollan, 2008
All rights reserved
A portion of this book first appeared in The NewYoikTimes Magazine under the title "Unhappy Meals."
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Pollan, Michael.
In defense of food : an eater's manifesto / Michael Pollan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-59420-145-5
1. Nutrition. 2. Food habits. I.Title.
RA784.P643 2008
613—dc22 2007037552
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Designed by Marysarah Quinn
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FOR ANN AND GERRY,
With gratitude for your loyal friendship
and inspired editing
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION An Eater's Manifesto l
I THE AGE O F N U T R I T I O N I S M 17
ONE – From Foods to Nutrients 19
TWO – Nutritionism Defined 27
THREE –Nutritionism Comes to Market 32
FOUR –Food Science's Golden Age 36
FIVE –The Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis 40
six –Eat Right, Get Fatter 50
SEVEN –Beyond the Pleasure Principle S3
EIGHT –The Proof in the Low-Fat Pudding 58
NINE –Bad Science 61
TEN –Nutritionism's Children 78
I I THE W E S T E R N D I E T A N D T H E
D I S E A S E S O F C I V I L I Z A T I O N 83
ONE – The Aborigine in All of Us 85
TWO – The Elephant in the Room 89
THREE – The Industrialization of Eating :
What We Do Know 101
1 ) From Whole Foods to Refined 106
2 ) From Complexity to Simplicity 114
3 ) From Quality to Quantity 118
4 ) From Leaves to Seeds 124
5 ) From Food Culture to Food Science 132
III G E T T I N G O V E R N U T R I T I O N I S M 137
ONE – Escape from the Western Diet 139
TWO – Eat Food: Food Defined 147
THREE – Mostly Plants : What to Eat 161
FOUR – Not Too Much: How to Eat 182
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 202
SOURCES 206
RESOURCES 229
INDEX 231
IN DEFENSE of F O O D
INTRODUCTION «
AN E A T E R ' S M A N I F E S T O
E at food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the suppos
edly incredibly complicated and confusing question o f what
we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.
I hate to give the game away right here at the beginning
o f a whole book devoted to the subject, and I'm tempted to
complicate matters in the interest o f keeping things going for
a couple hundred more pages or so. I'll try to resist, but will
go ahead and add a few more details to flesh out the recom
mendations. Like, eating a little meat isn't going to kill you,
though it might be better approached as a side dish than as
a main. And you're better off eating whole fresh foods rather
than processed food products. That's what I mean by the rec
ommendation to "eat food," which is not quite as simple as it
sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat,
today there are thousands o f other edible foodlike substances
in the supermarket. These novel products o f food science often
2 « IN DEFENSE OF FOOD
c o m e in packages elaborately festooned with health claims,
which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece
o f advice: I f you're concerned about your health, you should
probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Be
cause a health claim on a food product is a strong indication
it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
You can see how quickly things can get complicated.
I started on this quest to identify a few simple rules about
eating after publishing The Omnivores Dilemma in 2 0 0 6 . Questions
o f personal health did not take center stage in that book, which
was more concerned with the ecological and ethical dimen
sions o f our eating choices. (Though I've found that, in most
but not all cases, the best ethical and environmental choices
also happen to be the best choices for our health—very good
news indeed.) But many readers wanted to know, after they'd
spent a few hundred pages following me following the food
chains that feed us, "Okay, but what should I eat? And now that
you've been to the feedlots, the food-processing plants, the
organic factory farms, and the local farms and ranches, what
do you eat?"
Fair questions, though it does seem to me a symptom o f
our present confusion about food that people would feel the
need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or
doctor or government food pyramid, on so basic a question
about the conduct o f our everyday lives as humans. I mean,
what other animal needs professional help in deciding what
it should eat? True, as omnivores—creatures that can eat just
about anything nature has to offer and that in fact need to eat
a wide variety o f different things in order to be healthy—the
AN EATER'S MANIFESTO 3
"What to eat" question is somewhat more complicated for us
than it is for, say, cows. Yet for most o f human history, humans
have navigated the question without expert advice. To guide us
we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food,
is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how
much o f it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and
when and with whom have for most o f human history been a
set o f questions long setded and passed down from parents to
children without a lot o f controversy or fuss.
But over the last several decades, m o m lost much o f her
authority over the dinner menu, ceding it to scientists and
food marketers (often an unhealthy alliance o f the two) and,
to a lesser extent, to the government, with its ever-shifting di
etary guidelines, food-labeling rules, and perplexing pyramids.
Think about it: Most o f us no longer eat what our mothers ate
as children or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as chil
dren. This is, historically speaking, an unusual state o f affairs.
My own mother grew up in the 1 9 3 0 s and 1 9 4 0 s eating a
lot o f traditional Jewish-American fare, typical o f families who
recently emigrated from Russia or Eastern Europe: stuffed cab
bage, organ meats, cheese blintzes, kreplach, knishes stuffed
with potato or chicken liver, and vegetables that often were
cooked in rendered chicken or duck fat. I never ate any o f
that stuff as a kid, except when I visited my grandparents. My
mother, an excellent and adventurous cook whose own menus
were shaped by the cosmopolitan food trends o f New York
in the 1960s (her influences would have included the 1 9 6 4
World's Fair; Julia Child and Craig Claiborne; Manhattan res
taurant menus o f the time; and o f course the rising drumbeat
4 « IN DEFENSE OF FOOD
o f food marketing) served us a rotating menu that each week
completed a culinary world tour: beouf bourguignon or beef
Stroganoff on Monday; coq au vin or oven-fried chicken (in
a Kellogg's Cornflakes crust) on Tuesday; meat loaf or Chinese
pepper steak on Wednesday (yes, there was a lot o f beef); spa
ghetti pomodoro with Italian sausages on Thursday; and on her
weekend nights off, a Swanson'sTV dinner or Chinese takeout.
She cooked with Crisco or Wesson oil rather than chicken or
duck fat and used margarine rather than butter because she'd
absorbed the nutritional orthodoxy o f the time, which held
that these more up-to-date fats were better for our health.
(Oops.)
Nowadays I don't eat any o f that stuff—and neither does
my mother, who has moved on too. Her parents wouldn't rec
ognize the foods we put on the table, except maybe the butter,
which is back. Today in America the culture o f food is chang
ing more than once a generation, which is historically unprec
edented—and dizzying.
What is driving such relentless change in the American
diet? One force is a thirty-two-billion-dollar food-marketing
machine that thrives on change for its own sake. Another is the
constantly shifting ground o f nutrition science that, depending
on your point o f view, is steadily advancing the frontiers o f our
knowledge about diet and health or is just changing its mind
a lot because it is a flawed science that knows much less than
it cares to admit. Part o f what drove my grandparents' food
culture from the American table was officiai scientific opinion,
which, beginning in the 1960s, decided that animal fat was a
deadly substance. And then there were the food manufacturers,
